Goodness, no. The compiler can elide unreferenced symbols, that's not at all the same thing as "stuff you actually use". Just build a static glibc binary someday around "int main(void) { return 0; }" for a reference as to just how much stuff can get sucked in even if you think you aren't using it.

In fact "unexpectedly included feature" was part of the xz-utils attack last year! The backdoor leveraged the fact that the openssh daemon linked against libsystemd for authentication, which links against liblzma (for some reason, I don't know why), despite xz not being required for anything in the ssh protocol. Boom.

And in that case, the two dependencies (systemd and xz-utils) were inarguably in the "complicated" category that apps can't be expected to reimplment. Think how much more complicated this gets if every bit of junk logic becomes a "dependency".

People need to be thinking about this as a problem!